BUFFALO, N.Y. —The University at Buffalo is establishing a
new center to conduct research on the human microbiome, the
collective microorganisms that live on and in the human body. The
goal of research conducted at the center is to develop a base of
knowledge about the human microbiome and its role in health and
disease.

The multidisciplinary UB Center for Microbiome Research will be
directed by Robert J. Genco, DDS, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor
in the Department of Oral Biology in the School of Dental Medicine,
who also has appointments in the Department of Microbiology and
Immunology, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB
and the Department of Immunology at Roswell Park Cancer
Institute.

Effective May 1, Genco will leave his post as director of the
Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach (STOR)
to head the center. “Bob is stepping down from STOR to
pursue research, his first passion,” said Venu Govindaraju,
PhD, vice president for research and economic development,
“but those of us who have worked with him over the past 14
years that he has directed STOR know that guiding UB innovations
toward commercialization has always been close to his heart as
well. His robust understanding of the often unpredictable
trajectory of scientific research has made him an outstanding
advocate for our faculty innovators. Over the years, Bob has
instilled in this university a dynamic climate in which faculty
entrepreneurs are increasingly successful.”

Formerly chair of the Department of Oral Biology for 25 years,
current director of the Periodontal Disease Clinical Research
Center and a member of the National Academy of Medicine, Genco is
an expert in the microbiome and a pioneer in the study of the
impact that oral health has on overall health. He and his
colleagues were among the first to report a connection between gum
disease and heart disease and stroke, and led studies relating
periodontitis to diabetes and obesity.

“Under Dr. Genco’s leadership, UB’s new Center
for Microbiome Research clearly leverages the rich resources our
investigators have already developed here in the School of Dental
Medicine and throughout the entire university in order to explore
the microbiome and its extraordinary implications for human health
and disease,” said Joseph J. Zambon, DDS, PhD, interim dean
and SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor, UB School of Dental
Medicine.

Genco said that studies of the microbiome “promise to
transform life sciences, leading to new approaches to controlling
disease and maintaining health.”

Some of the areas he and his colleagues will focus on include
why people with diabetes are at higher risk for periodontal
disease.

“We will be asking if the oral and intestinal microbiomes
are different in patients with diabetes and, if so, should that
signal a different approach to managing these patients?” said
Genco. “We’ll also look at the microbiome in pregnant
women to better understand the role of the placental and fetal
microbiome in the health and disease of the fetus. We’re
interested in the periodontal status of pregnant women who have
gestational diabetes and how what we know about the microbiome
might help develop new treatments for them.”

The new center will focus, in part, on the oral microbiome,
which has been a key interest of UB researchers, and its
relationship to the microbiome in other sites in the body.

Genco and his colleagues will have access to thousands of
samples of periodontal disease and extensive health information
from 4,000 postmenopausal women who participated in the Buffalo
OsteoPerio study, led by Jean Wactawski-Wende, PhD, dean of the
School of Public Health and Health Professions, as well as from
1,600 subjects in the Buffalo Myocardial Infarction Periodontal
Study.

The new center will collaborate with researchers in the Genome,
the Environment and the Microbiome (GEM), one of UB’s
Communities of Excellence, as well as with those conducting
research under Wactawski-Wende, principal investigator on a $3.9
million National Institutes of Health grant, a prospective study of
the oral microbiome and periodontitis in postmenopausal women.

“The establishment of the Center for Microbiome Research
at UB provides the university with the ability to pursue so many
opportunities in this exciting field, which has such deep roots at
UB,” said Wactawski-Wende. “The ability of this new
center to support UB research on the microbiome will be entirely
complementary to avenues we are pursuing on the NIH
grant.”

According to Genco, the explosion of interest in studying the
microbiome is partly a result of new technologies that are making
the study of the microbiome far more feasible and less expensive
than they had been in the past.

“Previously, if you wanted to study bacteria in the mouth,
you had to grow them in culture,” he explained, “but
roughly half the oral bacteria cannot be cultured. Now, powerful
methods like nucleic acid sequencing techniques allow us to
identify and determine the relative abundance of most, if not all,
of the organisms at that and other sites in nature. These
techniques have revolutionized the study of microbes, including
viruses and fungi, since all of them can be studied using these
sequencing techniques.”

These analytical techniques tailored for study of the microbiome
are already available at UB’s New York State Center of
Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, Genomics Core and
Specialized Bioinformatics, where much of the new center’s
research will be conducted.

Clinical studies will be carried out in the School of Dental
Medicine in its Periodontal Disease Research Center as well as the
Center for Preventive Medicine in the UB School of Public Health
and Health Professions and the Clinical and Translational Research
Center (CTRC). Laboratory studies will be carried out in the
School of Dental Medicine and the Jacobs School of Medicine and
Biomedical Sciences.

· Michael
Buck, PhD, associate professor in the departments of Biochemistry
and Biomedical Informatics, co-director of the UB Genomics and
Bioinformatics facility and director of the WNYSTEM Stem Cell
Sequencing/Epigenomics Facility.